Golden Cookie
The Golden Cookie (not to be confused with the Red Cookie) is an object that shows up on the screen in a random position during normal gameplay. It remains on the screen for 13 seconds, slowly fading into nothing (the time it stays on-screen can be increased, see below). If it is clicked before it disappears entirely, it will grant the player one of four semi-random outcomes. You can see how many Golden cookies you have clicked in the Stats menu. The menu previously listed how many Golden cookies have been missed, but Orteil removed that feature due to many players complaining that it's "messing with their OCD". Related Achievements/Upgrades Related Upgrades Outcomes Note: These numbers only apply exactly for your first cookie. There is an 80% chance that the cookie will be forced to be different from the previous effect. All chances are calculated from the source code. *'48.175%' to get "Frenzy": Get x7 cookie production for 77 seconds. Affects Cookies per Second, but does NOT affect Cookies per Click (although it indirectly affects cookies per click with the Plastic/Iron/Titanium/Adamantium/Unobtainium Mouse upgrades). Doesn't stack with itself. *'48.175%' to get "Lucky!": Get an instant boost of cookies equal to 10% of the current cookies plus 13, or 20 minutes worth of cookies (which is CPS*1200) plus 13, whichever is less. (Stacks with Frenzy; if Frenzy is active when you get "Lucky," you can potentially get 20x7 = 140 minutes worth of cookies) *'3.325%' to get "Clicking Frenzy": Gives x777 cookies per click for 13 seconds. **Only works for manual clicking. **Can also indirectly stack with frenzy. After buying all the main "fingers" upgrades (as far as Quintillion), your clicking power during frenzy can increase by up to approx x7 because of the increase in CpS, so therefore getting a "Clicking Frenzy" during a "Frenzy" yields roughly x5400 clicking power until either the "Frenzy" or "Clicking Frenzy" ends. (Actually 5400 not 5439, as the true cookie-per-click increase with all but Sextillion fingers is 6.95x; with that upgrade, it's a slightly higher amount that has not yet been properly measured) *'0.325%' to start a "Cookie Chain": The first cookie you click in the chain will reward you with +7 cookies, and 3 seconds after being clicked another cookie will appear which grants +77 cookies, and then the third +777 cookies, and so on. Every time you click the golden cookie, after it rewards cookies, it runs a couple checks. The first five will always appear (as long as you don't miss clicking them), but after that, there are a few things that can cause the chain to break: ** Missing a cookie (at any point in the chain, even the first five) will break the chain. Each cookie stays onscreen for 10 to 1 seconds (min-capped 1 second at 10+ chain). This lifespan will NOT be increased by Lucky Day or Serendipity. ** Every cookie past the 5th has a 10% chance to not appear. ** Chain cookies will stop appearing if the next cookie provides more than 25% of your bank, or more than 6 hours of automatically collected cookies. ** There is no cap. : Golden Cookies will not start chains until you have at least 100,000 cookies baked all time. * 0.0002925% '''to get a "Cookie Blab" (really rare) that does nothing but has a funny message, which includes: **Cookie crumbliness x3 for 60 seconds! **Chocolatiness x7 for 77 seconds! **Dough elasticity halved for 66 seconds! **Golden cookie shininess doubled for 3 seconds! **World economy halved for 30 seconds! **Grandma kisses 23% stingier for 45 seconds! **Thanks for clicking! **Fooled you! This one was just a test. **Golden cookies clicked +1! **Your click has been registered. Thank you for your cooperation. **Thanks! That hit the spot! Strategy Before obtaining the golden cookie upgrades you can time roughly when the next one will appear based on when you clicked on the last one. The minimum time between each is 5 minutes without upgrades. This makes getting the 7 and 27 clicks needed to buy '''Lucky Day and Serendipity easier. After you get the upgrades there's less of a need to time them as they appear frequently. With both upgrades, if you get a Frenzy outcome; the earliest time a new Golden Cookie can spawn is two seconds before the frenzy ends. By keeping a large sum of cookies in your bank at any given point you can maximize the returns of the "Lucky" outcome. The maximum available from a Lucky outcome is 1,200 times your current CpS (20 minutes of production,) or 10% of your current banked cookies. The game chooses the lower number, so for maximum gain from lucky cookies you need to have 12,000 times your CpS in the bank. If you have that amount in your bank, both upgrades and get all the golden cookies on average every 4 minutes and 50 seconds you'll receive 20 minutes worth of production from "Lucky" and 7.7 minutes from "Frenzy", which is equivalent to a 426% CpS bonus, not counting the other outcomes. This makes''' Lucky Day and '''Serendipity some of the most powerful upgrades in the game, if you're willing to invest the time into watching for golden cookies. On the other hand, banking cookies ties up resources that you could use to buy cookie-producing buildings instead. With Serendipity, and assuming you hit all golden cookies, each banked cookie earns 0.1 cookies on average every 290 seconds, so each additional average cookie-per-second from "Lucky" costs 2900 cookies. As long as the price of buildings hasn't increased too much, buying them immediately without banking is a cheaper way to improve your CpS -- especially because "Frenzy" applies only to building income (roughly doubling every building's effective CpS) but doesn't affect the interest rate from banking. If the building you're considering buying costs less than 2,900 times twice its net CpS contribution, you should buy it as soon as you can afford it. In practical terms, if your antimatter condensers are upgraded to String theory but not Large macaron collider, you should start banking only when the next condenser will cost about 14,000,000,000 times your CpS multiplier. This threshold will be proportionally higher if you don't anticipate hitting all of the golden cookies. *A trick to make golden cookies easier to see is to resize the browser window to an area roughly the size of a golden cookie. The golden cookie always appears somewhere within the area of the browser window. When the area is restricted in such a way it only takes a quick glance to check if a golden cookie has appeared. *This strategy is also very helpful during cookie chains. When zoomed in, golden and red cookies appear larger so you're less likely to break the chain by missing a cookie. 'Get Lucky' Upgrade With the introduction of the Get Lucky upgrade, banking more than 84,000 seconds of cookies becomes a viable strategy. The doubled duration of the "Frenzy" outcome means "Lucky" golden cookies can potentially give you up to 1,200 times your CpS including the boost from the frenzy, or 8,400 times your base CpS (140 minutes of cookies!), assuming that the amount is less than 10% of your banked cookies. With the probability of doubling results reduced, the golden cookie following a "Frenzy" has almost an 90% chance of being a "Lucky", and a 60% chance of falling within the duration of the frenzy (since 6 potential golden cookie appearances fall within the "Frenzy" duration and 4 after)*. The large cost of the Get Lucky '''upgrade as well as the significant amount of banking required restricts this strategy to the end game however. Also, 10% of the time you can chain frenzies like this even without '''Get Lucky, however, the window is only 2 seconds so this can be difficult to pull off. *It should be noted, however, that one of the potential golden cookie appearances falls within the last 4 seconds of the Frenzy duration and since it takes a few seconds for a golden cookie to fade in to visibility there is only a 50/50 chance of a fully visible golden cookie spawning during the Frenzy. Once you have Get Lucky, the "Clicking Frenzy" can appear while already in a "Frenzy". This can lead to massive cookie creation. If you also have all the "mouse" upgrades, giving you 5% of your CpS per click, with an average of 6 clicks per second for 25 seconds (you usually lose a second moving the cursor onto the cookie), you can receive up to approximately 11⅓ hours of production not including the clicking bonuses from the Cursor upgrades (excluded from the calculation because of how variable the bonuses are) which can boost the final result to well over half a day's worth of production. Note that this also makes it entirely possible for a second "regular" Frenzy to occur whilst one is already in play. In this case, the effects do not stack; instead, it merely resets the duration of the 7x multiplier back to 154 seconds immediately following the second Golden Cookie click, not after the expiry of the first Frenzy. Similarly, triggering an Elder Frenzy (666x multiplier for 12 seconds) does not stack the multipliers, but instead replaces the Frenzy with the Elder Frenzy entirely. The brinksmanship of knowing just how long to leave a cookie on-screen before clicking it in order to maximise your cookie production thus becomes something of an art, unless you have a clock that shows seconds within your field of view and a good short-term memory (and keep in mind you'll be sacrificing the opportunity for a "Frenzy" + "Clicking Frenzy" overlap combo). Trivia *The effect "Frenzy" was previously x2 cookie production for 60 seconds Category:Post 1.0 Updates Category:Gameplay